I’ve just released Kobee Studio v1.4.0, which is probably the biggest update I’ve made to the plugin so far.

A lot of this release has been focused on building a better foundation for where I want to take Kobee Studio. The UI has been completely redesigned to make the growing number of tools easier to navigate, while leaving room for quite a few things I have planned.

Some of the major additions in this release include:

• Completely redesigned UI, including a new dark mode
• mm and mil support throughout the plugin
• Custom SVG assets — you can now import your own icons and symbols and reuse them across projects
• Label profiles — save a particular combination of label settings and recall it later
• Default profiles — saved profiles can be loaded automatically when Kobee Studio opens
• Backup and restore — settings, profiles and custom assets can now be exported to a ZIP and restored later

Installing through KiCad

One of the other big changes isn’t actually inside the plugin: Kobee Studio can now be installed and updated directly through KiCad’s Plugin and Content Manager.

Add the following as a custom repository:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mrcpuddington/mrcpuddington-kicad-repository/main/repository.json

Then Kobee Studio can be installed normally through KiCad, and future updates should be much easier to distribute.

If you’ve previously installed Kobee Studio manually, remove the existing installation first before installing the repository version.

I’m still working through the documentation following all of these changes, particularly the guide for creating SVG assets that work well on PCBs.

There’s plenty more I want to add, but this release gets a lot of the underlying pieces in place for that.

If you’re using Kobee Studio, I’d love for you to try the new release and let me know what works, what doesn’t, and what you’d like to see next.

⁠Kobee Studio on GitHub